For this past week, our group met for 1 hour on Sunday to discuss the development of Omni, as well as to discuss the logo and final designs of Omni. I worked individually for a total of 5 hours this week on the research and development of Omni.
My Work
API Research (1.5 hours)
- I researched further into Wiki.js (https://js.wiki/) and realized that I made a mistake in picking it to use to grab the images of artists for Omni. You need to install Wiki.js and pull the information from a database, and we want to keep the application light, so this wouldn’t necessarily work for what we want to build at the moment. After further research, I found that the artist object that the Spotify API (https://developer.spotify.com/) gives you when you request for an artist contains an image link for that specific artist. Not all artists have an image, but most do, so we will use this instead of Wiki.js.
Omni Development (3.5 hours)
- I started styling the interface of Omni for this week by changing the colors used on the site, as well as adjusting certain elements to match the branding/styling of Omni.
- I had many issues while working on this, as Bluehost, as well as my browser, continued to cache all of the server files as I was working on the site. Basically, this meant that I would update the css, js, and html, and then upload those files to the site, and then I had about 3-4 different caches that would appear on refresh of the site. This made it extremely hard to even see the changes, as multiple times it took minutes to see them.
- I ended up changing the index.html file to an index.php file, so that I could add version increments to the file extensions of the css and js files. The version increments used a php function that gets the current time on load of the site. An example of this would be: styles.css?version=1669004523. This forces the server to make sure it has all of the current files, instead of showing cached files.
- Along with this, I also needed to update the redirect from the node server so that the user would land on the index.php, and not an index.html that doesn’t exist. Once all of this work was completed, I was able to work on the styling of Omni, which I will continue to work on moving forward.
- Aside from css, I also styled the current Omni logo to go from the center of the screen to the top left once an artist is searched for, using js.
In the Future
- This week I will be continuing on the styling of Omni. I want to start to figure out how to limit the amount of related artists shown on each artist search.
- I will be doing more research into the artist object that the Spotify API returns, and to start to figure out how to pull specific information from this object. Once this is figured out, the development of Omni will pick up speed.
